Presented by Center for Comparative Muslim Studies, SFU School of Communications, SFU School of International Studies, SFU Institute for the Humanities, SFU Department of History, UBC Middle East Studies, SFU's David Lam Centre, and the University of Victoria MEICON Working Group

Public Remote Talk by Dr. Maya Mikdashi: “A Sextarian World: The Geopolitics of Sex and Sexuality in the Transnational Middle East”

REMOTE LECTURE FOR MEICON CONFERENCE

March 23 | 12:15 - 1:45 PST

We at CCMS are pleased and excited to be hosting this year’s iteration of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Consortium’s annual conference for students! Join us for this public talk by Dr. Maya Mikdashi, taking place during MEICON.

Speaker:

Dr. Maya Mikdashi is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a Lecturer in the Program for Middle East Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University, and also holds an MA from Georgetown University and a BA from the Lebanese American University in Beirut.

Maya has been a Mellon Fellow, a Faculty Fellow at NYU, and has been granted research grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Middle East Research Commission, and Council/Ashkal Alwan. Maya is the author of Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon  (Stanford University Press, 2022). Sextarianism is a theorization of the relationships between sexual and political difference. It suggests that producing, erupting, securitizing, and traversing the borders between the supposedly private and public spheres are key to understanding how secularism is operationalized, imagined, and desired in a world of nation states. While it emerges from archival and ethnographic research in Lebanon, Sextarianism offers transnational frameworks for understanding the relationships between sovereignty, secularism, violence, sexual difference, religious pluralism, law, and the state. For example, Sextarianism offers a language to think about bodily rights or trans rights in the United States, or the regulation of sexual difference more broadly, comparatively with the regulation of sexual difference in Egypt, Turkey, India, or France. It does so by focusing on technologies and ideologies of power that nation states share regardless of location: bureaucracy, law, and the structuring binaries of the public and private on the one hand, and the religious and the secular on the other.